There, he worked for major magazines including Life, Vanity Fair, and Harper’s Bazaar as well as advertising and promotional campaigns for Twentieth Century Fox and Universal.
[5] 1965 to 1980, Nitsche lived in Paris where he produced over 2,000 color illustrations for the five-volume encyclopedia, L’Épopée Nationale d’un Siècle, which covered 100 years of science and technology.
English, French, Japanese, Hindi, Russian, and German were all used in the campaign; poignantly chosen to highlight the nations that were committed at the time to developing atomic energy for peaceful purposes.
Nitsche was barred from depicting specific General Dynamics products - in many cases these top secret defense ships and weapons were not even shown or shared with the artist.
This limitation pushed Nitsche to lean into abstraction, and he ended up creating one of the most important corporate advertising campaigns of the Twentieth Century.
Atoms for Peace, as this original series was coined, was a massive success and was continued by Nitsche throughout his tenure at General Dynamics.
Clocks, dishes, even cities like Las Vegas were influenced by Erik Nitsche's innovative designs for General Dynamics.